When a program is broadcast, it is important for a number of reasons to obtain information about the audience. The “program” can be audio and/or video, commercial and/or non-commercial, and is obtained as a programming signal from a program signal source. The “broadcast” of the program can be over the airwaves, cable, satellite, or any other signal transmission medium. This term also applies to playback from recording media such as audio tape, video tape, DAT, CD-ROM, and semiconductor memory. An “audience” for such program reproduction is constituted of the persons who perceive the program. Thus, all the people who have perceived any part of the program are included in the audience, but those present so as to perceive the program at a given time are considered as forming the audience in attendance.
The program is “performed” by any means which result in some form of perception by human beings, the most common being video and audio. The “reproduction equipment” is any and all types of units to convert a signal into human perceptible form.
The audience can be described as being “tuned” to a program when the signal source is a TV or radio broadcast station. This term may be less commonly applied when the signal source is a tape recorder. However, for the sake of brevity and convenience, the word “tuned” is applied herein to all situations in which an audience member selects a particular program, whether it be by twisting a dial, operating a remote control, or popping a cassette into a tape recorder for playback.
Audience survey information has been obtained in the past by audience measurement and market research organizations for advertisers and broadcasters. For example, advertisers are interested in knowing the number of people exposed to their commercials. Also, broadcasters use statistics on audience size and type for setting their advertising rates.
It is of interest to survey an audience not only in terms of its number but also to obtain characteristics of its individual members. Thus, for example, advertisers wish to identify the audience members by economic and social categories. This is possible if individual members of the audience can be identified.
Prior art techniques for obtaining such information involve primarily the following approaches. With one approach, people within the range of the radio station or who receive a television channel (either over the air or by cable) are contacted by phone and interviewed regarding their listening habits. Each person is questioned about the programs which that individual watched and/or listened to during the previous, say twenty-four hours. However, this technique is suspect because it is subject to recall errors as well as possible bias introduced by the interviewer. For example, if a specific TV program is mentioned to the person being interviewed, the suggestion may elicit a positive response to a question regarding whether that program was watched even when it actually was not. Another approach involves keeping diaries by persons agreeing to act as test subjects. Diary entries are to be made manually throughout the day to keep track of what signal sources are being watched and/or listened to. The diaries are collected periodically and analyzed. However, this approach is prone to inaccuracies because the test subjects may fail to make entries due to forgetfulness or laziness, or wrong entries can be made due to tardiness in attending to this task. Thus, it can be readily seen that the phone-contact, recall-dependent approach described above is unsatisfactory because people may not accurately remember what they listened to at any particular time and, also, because of the potential problem of suggestive bias. The diary-based approach is likewise unsatisfactory because people may not cooperate and be as meticulous in making timely diary entries as required to obtain the desired record-keeping accuracy. The above-described approaches require a significant and time-consuming effort on the part of the test participants to respond to the phoned-in questions or to record their TV viewing and/or radio listening habits.
Partly automated systems have also been developed which require relatively less active participation by the audience members. U.S. Pat. No. 3,056,135 issued to Currey et al. describes automatically determining the listening habits of wave signal receiver users. It provides a record of the number and types of persons using a wave signal receiver by monitoring the operational conditions of the receiver and utilizing both strategically placed switches for counting the number of persons entering, leaving and within a particular area and it employs a photographic recorder for periodically recording the composition of the audience. A mailable magazine provides a record of both the audience composition and the receiver operation information for manual processing by a survey organization. Shortcomings of this approach include the slowness with which data can be acquired and, further, many audience members object to being identified from the photographic record.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,644,509 issued to Kiewit et al. discloses an ultrasonic, pulse-echo method and apparatus for determining the number of persons in the audience and the composition of the audience of a radio receiver and/or a television receiver. First and second reflected ultrasonic wave maps of the monitored area are collected, first without people and second with people who may be present in the monitored area. The first collected background defining map is subtracted from the second collected map to obtain a resulting map. The resulting map is processed to identify clusters having a minimum intensity. A cluster size of the thus identified clusters is utilized to identify clusters corresponding to people in an audience. While this arrangement is effective for counting viewing audience members, individual audience members cannot be identified.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,652,915 issued to Heller, III describes a system for identifying the presence of TV viewers where the viewer wears a headphone which remains activated to receive audio by transmitting an acknowledgment signal in response to periodic polls.
Other automated audience surveying techniques are known in which the test participants forming the audience need only play a passive role. For example, it is known to utilize a survey signal transmitted by a broadcast station in combination with a programming signal. As disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,718,106 issued to the present inventor, the transmitted survey signal is detected by a receiver and reproduced by a speaker. The speaker produces pressure waves in the air that can be detected by a microphone, for example, and with a frequency that is in what is scientifically regarded as the audible range of human hearing. Such pressure waves, or signals, are referred to as acoustic. An acoustic signal is regarded as being audible, irrespective of whether it is actually heard by a person, as long as it can be produced by a conventional speaker and detected by a conventional microphone. The audible acoustic signal is detected by a microphone and associated circuitry embodied in a portable device worn by the test participants, and data on the incidence of occurrence and/or the time of occurrence of the acoustic signal, and the code it contains, are stored and analyzed therein.
Variations of this passive technique can be found in U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,457,807 and 5,630,203 both issued to the present inventor.
With the passive technique of the prior art, each portable device could be pre-programmed with the unique identification (“ID”) of its wearer. This ID information is downloaded to a central processing station with the detected codes stored in the portable device to provide not only audience measurement data but also information about the individual audience members.
Although such a portable-device-based approach has great potential, it has several shortcomings even when implemented with the latest integrated circuit technology. For example, the cost per unit is unacceptably high. Also, the devices are too heavy to be worn comfortably. Furthermore, such devices require a high capacity memory to store all the information needed to provide the desired survey information. Lastly, the battery life is inconveniently shortened by all the functions such a device would need to perform.
A further evolution in the use of a passive technique with a portable-device-based approach can be found in U.S. Pat. No. 7,155,159 co-invented and assigned to the present inventor. The subject matter disclosed in this patent is hereby incorporated by reference. A brief discussion of this patent is provided immediately below with regard to FIG. 1.
As shown in FIG. 1, an encoded signal is generated by a program signal source 1, such as a TV broadcast station. Its output signal 2, which is a combination of a programming signal and a surveying code, is received by code retransmission source 3. Code retransmission source 3 can be capable of suitably reproducing the programming signal for video and/or audio performance. However, for audience surveying purposes, its key function is to detect the surveying code in the signal 2 received from programming signal source 1, and then to retransmit it in suitable fashion as output signal 4, as explained below. The code re-transmitted by code retransmission source 3 is detected and processed by stationary apparatus 5. A plurality of portable devices 7 operate cooperatively with stationary apparatus 5, in a manner described below. Details of these key components will now be provided, as follows.
A discussion of the source 1 of encoded program signals can be found in the above-mentioned patents of the present inventor, and such discussion found therein is hereby incorporated herein by reference.
Details of code retransmission source 3 can also be found in the above-mentioned patents issued to the present inventor, and such details found therein are hereby incorporated herein by reference. Suffice it to say that code retransmission source 3 is preferably a conventional component of a commercially available video and/or audio instrument, such as a television set. The conventional component of interest could be, for example, the TV's speaker. No retrofitting of the instrument would be required in order for such component to function as a code retransmission source. In such case, the output of code retransmission source 3 to stationary apparatus 5 would be in the form of an acoustic signal. See U.S. Pat. No. 4,718,106. However, it is also contemplated that some relatively minimal circuitry could be added to process and retransmit the code, as discussed in the above-mentioned patents of the present inventor. See U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,457,807 and 5,630,203.
The reception location that stationary apparatus 5 would typically be placed within is an area containing an instrument for reproducing the video and/or audio programming signal (“location of interest”). The area would also be of sufficient size to accommodate an audience, preferably of several members. An example would be a room with a television set and seating capacity for several persons. Stationary apparatus 5 is a self-contained, relatively small and unobtrusive unit that can be placed on a surface in the room in such a way that communication between it and the portable devices worn by persons in the room is not blocked. To some extent, the restrictions on its placement depend on the nature of the communication signals, with radio signals providing a higher degree of flexibility than infrared signals, for example, The installation of stationary apparatus 5 is very simple in that it must be plugged into a wall outlet socket to receive power. Also, to enable data download, it is connected to a telephone line unless a cellular telephone device is used. Only a one time, fast, simple installation is involved that requires no retrofit of other apparatus in the house. This is in contrast to the prior art surveying equipment which does require a retrofitting operation. Apparatus 5 also improves the level of cooperation by the test participants because, for example, it overcomes any reluctance that prospective test participants would have to join the audience survey if it meant having holes drilled in their TV's, and the like.
Each of the persons cooperating as test participants is provided with a customized, portable device 7. All of the portable devices have identical circuitry. They are made unique, however, by virtue of the data stored therein. In particular, stored in each one is a unique ID signal which can be used to identify its wearer. Consequently, the devices cannot be interchanged among the various wearers but, rather, are specifically assigned to a particular person. Also, each portable device is provided with a unique delay period. The reason for this feature will become apparent from the description provided below.
The operations of stationary apparatus 5 and portable device 7 can be implemented, for example, by a suitable microprocessor receiving input signals and generating control signals responsive thereto. At preset transmission intervals, stationary apparatus 5 emits a query signal 24. A detector in portable device 7 is designed to detect query signal 24 and identify it as that particular signal. A determination is then made whether the detected signal is the query signal and, if so, the above-mentioned delay period will be initiated and performed by a delay circuit. When the end of the delay period is reached, portable device 7 will transmit the pre-stored ID signal 25. Thus, each of portable devices 7 within range of stationary apparatus 5 (i.e. worn by those persons within the reception location and thus forming the audience in attendance) will react to query signal 24 by transmitting its unique ID signal. However, since the delay period of each portable device 7 is unique, as mentioned above, this transmission of ID signals by the plurality of portable devices in the room will be staggered so that no ID signal “steps on” another.
The ID signals from the respective portable devices 7 are received by stationary apparatus 5 within a receive period. If such a signal has been detected, then stationary apparatus 5 performs a matching test to determine whether the detected signal matches any of the pre-stored ID's in its memory. If a match is found, then the detected ID signal is stored in memory.
If it is determined that no signal has been detected, or that a detected signal does not match any of the pre-stored ID's, then a determination is made whether the end of the receive period has been reached. If the end of the receive period has been reached, then this phase of the operation is ended, and this can be used to trigger data transfer, as described below.
Up to this point, a description has been provided which results in determining the specific identity of the audience members who are then in attendance within the reception location. Those identities are stored in memory. The frequency with which this determination is made is a matter of engineering choice depending on the memory capacity to be made available for this task versus the perceived importance of the need to have the most updated information regarding the audience. Thus, if the duration of the transmission interval for query signal 24 is selected to be one minute, for example, accurate data will be available promptly after any member of the audience leaves the room. However, this comes at the cost of requiring a higher memory capacity than would be needed, for example, if such duration were to be selected at 15 minutes.
The above-described surveying codes from broadcast signal 2 are re-transmitted by code retransmission source 3 and received by stationary apparatus 5. Each detected surveying code is stored in memory. Thus, for any given measurement period, as explained below, the memory has stored therein a combination of the ID's for all the audience members who are currently in attendance together with the surveying codes for the particular program being viewed by that audience during such time period. The output of a clock can also be used to time stamp the stored ID's and/or the stored surveying codes. This arrangement of storing the ID signals with the surveying codes received within the measurement period enables the association of a program segment being performed during it (as identifiable from the surveying code) with the audience then in attendance (as identifiable from the ID's). The provision of a time stamp can serve to gain additional information which may be of value.
Once information has been stored in memory, it is downloaded to central processing station 50. A download control trigger signal can be generated at preset intervals or at a preset time of day, as controlled by a clock, at any time by the manual operation of depressing a key, and/or by a remote trigger signal provided, for example, from the central processing station on communications link 88. Responsive to the control trigger signal, suitable download apparatus, such as a modem, will proceed to effect the transmission of data via communications link 88 from stationary apparatus 5 to the central processing station 50. The details of how this is implemented are well known and, thus, need not be described herein.
Use of stationary apparatus 5 provides a number of important improvements in audience surveying. Firstly, its installation into a household of test participants, for example, is fast and easy. Secondly, it is not reliant on battery power. Thirdly, the functions performed by apparatus 5 are such that the portable devices 7 can be relatively simple. Consequently, devices 7 can be light and small, and battery life is comparable to that of a digital watch, for example. Fourthly, it can be provided with any type of storage of any required capacity. For these and other reasons, the level of cooperation by the test participants is much higher than it would be with prior art approaches.
A significant variation is elimination of the query signal 24. Instead, portable devices 7 are designed to emit their ID signals at preset time intervals rather than being triggered to do so by the query signal.
Another possible variation is that the trigger signal is transmitted “periodically” at any regular and/or irregular intervals. It is mainly necessary to keep track of such trigger signal transmission so that the identification signals triggered in response thereto are identifiable. For the above-identified embodiment which does not utilize such a trigger signal, the identification signals can also be emitted “periodically” at regular and/or irregular intervals, the key point being that they are detected by the stationary apparatus.
Although the technique disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 7,155,159 is effective to provide useful audience monitoring information, some further improvements may provide even more meaningful results. More specifically, since ID signal 25 is preferably an RF signal, it is possible that portable devices located in rooms other than the one in which the TV is located will have their ID signal picked up by stationary apparatus 5. If so, then perhaps a person will be counted as an audience member even though s/he is in another room, perhaps even on the other side of a wall.
Another source of possible inaccuracies is a person standing behind the TV which is displaying the program of interest. Stationary apparatus 5 will pick up the ID signal 25 from that person's portable device 7 even though the person cannot see the TV screen and, therefore, is not a real audience member, at least for visual perception.
Another possibility is that the person is in the same room as the TV, and also is in front of the TV. However, if the room is usually very noisy and if the person is at a certain distance away from, or at a certain angle to the side of the TV, the number of people in the way and/or the noise level in the room severely interfere with that person's ability to visually and/or audibly perceive the program. One such environment where this can happen is a bar.